Just Wrought

I think this means I'm going to be on KUOW tomorrow between 12-2 pm.

http://www.kuow.org/program.php?id=20132

But more when I know more.

And I didn't even pay for it!  How old fashioned is that?

As Predicted, the Spin Begins . . .

. . . and I could've predicted the source of this first spin too, had I really cared to.

http://slog.thestranger.com/slog/archives/2010/04/29/pay-for-play-the-response

The Seattle Rep and the Fifth Avenue Take a Walk on the Sleazy Side

I will be honest: although I always hope for the best, I never really expected the Big Houses here in Seattle to have some sort of Road-to-Damascus conversion and start doing the right thing. I always assumed they would continue to offer safe and staid programming and promote it with safe and staid marketing techniques.  So when I read in this week’s Stranger that the Fifth Avenue was paying for coverage on KING 5 TV’S New Day Northwest without making it plain that the coverage was sponsored, I was actually genuinely shocked.  And I have to confess, it gave me a bit of pleasure, because I honestly did not think that, given their tepid programming, the Big Houses could ever possibly shock me again.

Folks, this story will get spun by the culpable spinners.  Those of us who are appalled by this supremely less than ethical behavior will be branded as naïve and bitter; but this is exactly the sort of thing the Bush Administration tried to pull. 

…the White House, … spent taxpayer money to produce local TV-news segments advocating policies of the Bush administration. The Government Accountability Office condemned these paid-for "news" segments as "covert propaganda," but the White House instructed agencies to ignore the GAO findings.

"As a former journalist, I'm horrified to be compared with the Bush administration," Larson said. "This isn't a news program—it's an entertainment program."

If the Rep and the Fifth cannot see what they did was wrong, then they have no business offering us art that purports to be honest, edgy, and untainted by corporate equivocation.

***

PS:  Brendan Kiley suggests here that all the Big Houses, plus the little ones like WET, too,  owe him back pay for covering them, but I would further suggest that NewsWrights United covered the Seattle theatre press in last fall’s It’s Not in the P-I: A Living Newspaper about a Dying Newspaper, so perhaps they in turn owe us a little som’n-som’n.  Granted, I wrote about Misha Berson and Joe Adcock. (You can watch the video here. ) and left out  Kiley, because, let’s face it, he’s just too boring.  But Brendan?  If you’re willing to make me an offer I’ll happily write a play about how you wrote an article about how the Fifth bought buzz and convinced the Rep to join their ethically dubious enterprise, for what I can only imagine was what they saw as the high-ground cover the Rep could offer them if the shit hit (which it did).  Forget cover, Big Houses.  Your cover is blown.  Get started living right, or get started dying.  There are no longer any in-betweens.

PPS:  A year and a half a go The Stranger gave me a hunk of change for being a “Genius”.  Obviously, this is a bogus award, the sole purpose of which was to get me to push traffic over to their website.  So go, damn you, go!  I don’t want them asking for their money back!

PPPS:  I hate loving The Stranger, but given the connect-the-dots drawing of Mohammad they ran on the front of this issue, how can I help my damned self.

Jose Amador and a Damned Good Argument for the Solo Show

It's a strange and wonderful world.  The very day I post my screed on solo shows and how Seattle's Big Houses are leaning too heavily on them, my good friend and colleague publishes a completely different point of view on why the solo show serves a vital purpose in his creative life, and in the larger creative life of our theatre community.

http://thesunbreak.com/2010/04/27/jos-amador-on-solo-performance-and-being-an-ethnic-theatre-artist-in-seattle

Go see this show.  Lord knows, for all my bitching, I'll sure as hell be there.  I'm thinking of going next Wednesday.  If you go that night and can prove you paid full price to get in, I'll buy you a drink.

Jose Amador, people!  One more reason Seattle is already World Class!

 

The Solo Show: A Risk Averse Artistic Administrator’s Best Friend

The fourth in a series of essays entitled: 
Towards a World Class Theatre

 

 

Some fifteen years ago Dawson Nichols and I were having lunch at a long gone Japanese noodle house on Broadway when he asked me an awkward question that I will now try to do a better job of answering.  Back then we were not the close friends and collaborators we are now—more like respectful but wary competitors for the title of AHA! Theatre’s Golden Boy.  Dawson had a much better line of attack on the prize, because while we both wrote strong multi-actor plays, Dawson also amazed us all with his impressively diverse catalogue of one-man shows, including Stop/Start, Virtual Solitaire, I Might be Edgar Allen Poe and Three Descents of Darwin.  I have always been captivated by Dawson’s one-person work. 

I have also always had my theoretical reservations about the genre, as Dawson must have suspected that day over yakisoba when he challenged me squarely, “You don’t think my solo work is theatre, do you?”  I must have made a weak apologetic smile. I must have hemmed and hawed. I think I finally answered, “Strictly speaking, no, but—“ and then went on to make some half-lame explication, but the look on Dawson’s face showed it all: hurt and disbelief at my dismissive arrogance, even as I tried to explain how much I respected him as a generative and performing artist.

So perhaps now, with my friendship with Dawson a little more secure (I hope), it is time to make that earlier explication sharper, and then explore that explication’s implications within our regional theatre administrator’s collective half-conscious effort to re-forge by fudging a new definition of the art form and thus raise the number of one-person shows they can get away with and still claim that they are practicing theatre.

Before writing this I decided to do a little research by reaching out to my compadres over at 14/48 via Facebook:

 

Paul Mullin

April 9 at 3:32pm

Hello lovers!

Any and/or all of you can answer. And yes, I'm going to quote you in my blog. I'm working on an essay about one-person shows. And my question is this: "Why don't you ever have the option of drawing just one actor in the actor draw? Are there any other reasons beyond the fact that that poor schlump would have to memorize too much?"

Let me know.

Love,

Paulie

Shawn Belyea

April 10, 2010 at 3:56pm

Re: Question for the 14/48 Crew

Cuz one-person shows are dumb. Mostly it's memorization and it's supposed to be a collaborative effort so we want actors to have some company.

Jodi-Paul Sanford Brown-Wooster

April 11 at 1:06am

I hate one person shows. And yes, I'm looking at you Lauren. There is no intrinsic dramatic tension with one person, it's fakey.

Peter Dylan O'Connor

April 11 at 3:52p

One person shows are fucking glorified camp fire stories...

Matthew Richter

April 11 at 8:33pm

i love one-person shows. and i think they're an interesting challenge for 14.48.

but i'm retired.

xom

If you seek consensus, you would be wise not to consult the prophets of 14/48.  Once again, I am left to my own opinions and devices.  I proceed with that caution for you, my gentle reader.

Basically, solo shows boil down into two kinds: the actor’s tour de force and the enlarged lecture.  Dawson Nichols shares the first tradition with Anna Deavere Smith, Chazz Palminteri and countless other talented writer/actors, who generate shows that then require them to become all of the characters on stage, even at times performing both sides of multi-sided dialogue.  Over the last few decades, it has become an increasingly effective way of growing an actor’s career.  Palminteri literally leveraged himself into playing the principal role, Sonny, in Robert DeNiro’s directorial debut film A Bronx Tale, which began as Palminteri’s one-man show of the same name.  As Rik Deskin, Aristic Director of The Eclectic Theatre points out, “When you’re self-producing/self-promoting, a solo show is one way to get yourself out there.”

My friend and comrade-at-arms, Mike Daisey, presents from the lecturer tradition, most recently reinvigorated by Spalding Gray, but one which runs the gamut, in just this country alone, from Jonathan Edwards to Mark Twain and right on up to David Sedaris and Sarah Vowell.  This kind of show employs more direct address, less actorly technique.  Instead of primarily inhabiting other characters, the lecturer’s own personality ties the evening together.  In the hands of a Daisy or Sedaris it can be hugely fun, funny and compelling, but no one plying the trade 130 years ago would have thought of calling themselves a theatre artist, even if a particular night’s performance happened to take place in a theater—unlikely in that age, since theaters were rarely dark and there was a plentitude of active churches, as well as all sorts of lecture halls specifically built for this purpose.  As different as these two kinds of solo show are, and as much as it seems the Nichols / Deveare Smith variety is much closer to theatre as we know it, they both represent variations of the much older, and completely honorable tradition of story telling.

Theatre, however, is something really quite different.  It happens in the preternaturally galvanized space between two or more people on stage and the other people in the audience.  It sprang forth from its older sibling, storytelling, in that radical moment when the teller pointed at someone in the campfire circle and said:  “You be me.  I’ll be the wolf.  We’ll show them how it happens.”  Thus a whole new art form was born.

As a solo lecturer, Mike Daisey has a point of view.  And a damned good one too.  He makes no bones about telling you what to think.  And if you want my opinion, you should listen to him.  I have a different role as a playwright and a different box of tools.  I can show you things happening, but it is up to you what to make of them.  Theatre is dialogue.  Not as part of the narrative, like in a novel, but as all of the show.  Even if no words are spoken, dramatic action takes place in a framework of implicit dialogue: people doing things to other people. This is why our collective audience hackles go up whenever a narrator starts telling us the story instead of enacting it.  Good playwrights understand this and know how to leverage the discordance of direct address narration (see Shakespeare’s Chorus in Henry V or Wilder’s Stage Manager in Our Town).  Lesser playwrights never seem to learn: you can’t tell an audience anything.  They can only be shown.  They can only ever come to their own conclusion about what is happening.

Dialogue breeds risk like flowers bloom scent, and risk is the fabric of theatre.  Because two or more people on stage can never know with certainty what an other is about to do, no matter how many times they have done it before, the audience attends the action with a sense of the innate exposure.  “Anything could happen, and we are in the same damned room with these agitated people.”   Risk is not a by-product of drama.  It is the main ingredient.  

Nothing wrong with masturbation, but everyone knows you cannot tickle yourself.   Likewise, I cannot, as a performer, ever surprise myself to the degree another performer can—arguments about unexpected inspiration notwithstanding.  When there is another actor on stage with me, I have to watch, I have to listen, I have to be wary.  Other actors can push you around, and you can push back.  No one can manufacture this kind of risk in a solo performance, no matter how earnestly the performer tries to convince his corpus callosum  not to tell his left brain what his right plans on doing.   Sure, an actor can mimic dialogue, playing both sides of a conversation, but even at its very best this trick still contains an unconscious but unavoidable note of condescension, like Donald Rumsfeld asking himself ostensibly difficult questions about the Iraq War in a press conference and then answering them with ostensibly matter-of-fact brilliance.  True dialogue adds a crucial dimension which defines theatre, just as surely as the third dimension of physical depth defines sculpture. 

Theatre also trades on what we show folk loftily refer to as “the willing suspension of disbelief.”  Wikipedia defines this notion as “the willingness of the audience to overlook the limitations of a medium, so that these do not interfere with the acceptance of those premises. According to the theory, suspension of disbelief is a quid pro quo: the audience tacitly agrees to provisionally suspend their judgment in exchange for the promise of entertainment.”  (I should fully disclose here how I hate this term, mostly for its gratuitous gracelessness.  I mean, is the double negative really necessary to nail the point?  What would be wrong with, say, “fabrication of belief?”)  In a solo show disbelief can never be truly suspended.  At best, it can be sent to detention, where it still manages to sulk and grimace and call attention to itself.

Let me be clear.  By pointing out that one-person shows are not, strictly speaking, theatre, I am in no way trying to denigrate them or argue for their banishment.  It has been a long standing tradition for regional theatres to opt for filling one slot in their season with an easily produced, low-overhead solo show, but indications are rising that Big Houses in this town intend to lean on this option more heavily in the future.  The Seattle Rep recently announced its 2010-2011 season in which they will be offering not one, but two solo shows,  The K of D in the smaller Leo K venue and Mike Daisey’s new piece on their Bagley Wright mainstage (a relatively unheard-of placement of a solo show for them.)  If Daisey does well (and as his friend and colleague, I cannot help but hope he does) you can bet you will be seeing more mainstage solo offerings from the Rep.  It is just too cheap for them not to.  And as long as no one’s complaining that they are not actually doing theatre in their theater, well…

Meanwhile, next door at the Intiman, they have answered with unblushing cynicism the call for more locally grown new plays by staging The Thin Place which they laud on their website as “the second world premiere by a local writer in Intiman's history.”  Note the pride with which they admit a fact of which they should rightly be ashamed.  Using a solo show to rectify their abysmal record reveals how little they wish to risk on the attempt.   How quickly will Intiman abandon and distance itself from The Thin Place if it does not do well with critics or audiences?  How likely are they to offer up the now tired Big House refrain when a locally grown piece does not catch fire right away?  “See?  We tried ‘locally grown’.  It just doesn’t work.  Can we please go back to retreading Pinter, Mamet and off-Broadway’s last season?”  Always behind such excuses are obfuscated variables of production and promotion that contribute to a given show’s putative failure but that go unnoticed and unconsidered in public.   In this case,  the crucial factor that will not be mentioned is that The Thin Place is a one-man show, and not, strictly speaking, theatre at all.

Regional Big Houses defend their solo performance offerings like a richly-endowed sculpture gallery might defend an exhibition of paintings.  “We love sculpture.  And of course we are a sculpture gallery, but sculpture itself is expensive and difficult to maintain.  Instead, why not enjoy some lovely paintings of sculptures?”  Paintings of sculptures can indeed be lovely, but not even an idiot would call them sculptures, any more than Mark Twain would have referred to himself as a theatre artist 130 years ago.  Solo performance billed as theatre is a pig in a poke.  The unpredictability of human beings interacting lies at the heart of what we are selling in the theatre.  We trade it out and bank our future on its diminishment at the very risk of our art form’s soul.

Next up: "Good Friend for Jesus’ Sake Forbear and Never Build another Proscenium Stage"

Playwright as Toolmaker: David Ball’s Incomparable BACKWARDS & FORWARDS

A bunch of us local playwrights (the same ones you won’t be seeing any time soon at a Seattle Big House near you) are busy working on the next edition of A Living Newspaper.  Last fall we produced the very first edition, It’s Not in the P-I: A Living Newspaper about a Dying Newspaper.  All through this process we have been working with an actual journalist, Tom Paulson, who in addition to being one of the founders and executive producers of NewsWrights United, also works as a freelance reporter specializing in science and world health issue.  Tom was on staff at The Seattle Post-Intelligencer for over twenty years prior to the demise of that paper’s paper edition.  Dawson Nichols and I have been bugging Tom to actually write something for the stage, an “article” for this next edition.  He says he wants to, seems eager even, but then turns shy, complaining that play-wrighting is an entirely different sort of scribbling and that he does not know the method.  (How I wish that a particular subset of the playwrights’ community shared this reticence to perpetrate dramatic mediocrity.)  So Tom asked us if there was a book he could read to find out how to write a play.  I said I didn’t know of any, smug in my belief that no such book could possibly exist.  Dawson said “Backwards & Forwards by David Ball.”  So I ordered Ball’s book from the library, and quickly discovered by the first few pages that once again Dawson had smashed my smugness:

A play is a series of actions.  A play is not about action, nor does it describe action.  Is a fire about flames?  Does it describe flames?  … Why do you think actors are called actors?

Where had this book been all my playwright’s life?!

Ball presents Backwards & Forwards as "a technical manual for reading plays'', but since its publication in 1983, it as been fully recognized and celebrated for what it really is: a stealthily but thinly disguised treatise on how to write them.  And why not?  No self-respecting playwright would want to write anything unworthy of the kind of careful reading Ball demands his students give a play.  With plain-spoken, clearly articulated admonishment, Ball calls us back to bare bones, reminding his putative readership: actors, directors, designers, anyone involved in actually staging theatre that scripts are nothing but architecture

Play characters are not real.  You cannot discover everything about them from the script.  The playwright cannot give much, because the more that is given, the harder it is to cast the part.  The playwright must leave most of the character blank to accommodate the actor.  Scripts contain bones, not people. 

Some other gems to tempt you into ordering this book, just as I intend to, after returning this copy to the library:

A character’s self description, or how others in a play describe a character, is not reliable for the simple real-life reason that what people say is not reliable….  Description must be validated by examination of action.  Action either verifies description, rending description redundant, or it reveals that the description is wrong.  Redundant or wrong: that is all description can be.

And. . .

A particularly insidious trap is the old assertion that character changes during a play.  But people in plays don’t change any more than people in real life do.

He goes on to point out that Edmund’s seeming point-of-death conversion to goodness at the end of King Lear--

Edmund:  I pant for life.  Some good I mean to do. / Despite of mine own nature

--isn’t a conversion at all, but rather yet another attempt to best his brother Edgar.

… By Act 5 Edgar is revered for his virtue, not his land.  Now Edmund must appear virtuous to get what he wanted all along: equality to Edgar.  It is the same trait, same desire.  Edmund’s character has not changed, but a changed situation calls for different tactics.  Edmund remains Edmund.

And then there is this, which hints at presaging a theory I am working on, that theatre has a unique line of attack on the collective unconscious:

The good [theatre] artist does not seek a group response, but rather a group of individual responses.

And a particular favorite in light of the struggle for a return to locally grown new work:

Playwrights—even great ones— do not write for the ages.  They write for their specific audiences….  Special problems arise when a play is done for an audience other than the one it was written for.

Just this morning I had to scold my 8-year old son.  He loves my tape measure, has always loved measuring things, but he also likes to pay the tape out and then let it reel back all at once in a ever-accelerating rush so that it slams back into the housing.  This drives me nuts because the edge of the tape is sharp and I’m worried he’s going to cut himself.  I said, “This is a real tape measure: a tool not a toy.  And some tools can hurt you if you don’t use them properly.”  I was instantly reminded of the penultimate paragraph in Ball’s book.

Think of the script as a tool.  Before you pick it up to use, know which is the handle and which is the blade—or you might cut your throat.

How many theatre artists are keeping their tools that sharp?  How many really respect or even care about the potential danger in what we do?  Is there any danger any more?  Are museums inherently dangerous or safe places to visit?  I think audiences come to theaters  not for craft, nor excellence, nor even for great directing nor great acting,  not even for important  ideas illustrated through words strung  beautifully together.  Audiences come to be thrilled.  Are will selling them that?  Are our tools sharp enough to cut us?

The indy film I wrote and acted in a lifetime ago. (Okay, okay, only 17 years ago.)

http://hittingtheground.com/

I'll buy a beer for anyone who can tell me who owns this website.

Lost Alamos

we knew it was going to be a long winter
          snow swallowed      a mud sucked boot
     and yeah we knew that we'd get through      but still 

     lose something somehow      like a bad bet won 
     on a dumb dare      wiser      but wondering
          why survive what you don't have to?      what's it prove?

and what now?      what would jesus do?      hell he'd
          go to the desert      las vegas      los
     alamos      some place bets are happily lost

      to the flat pan      the mesa      the hugeness      the
     bone-bleached and blueness      a place to bake
          back into something fresh flaky and      true

      a body of christ
              why not?     
          amen      again

 

2002